Installation of WPMU and BuddyPress on Local machine

I am trying to have BuddyPress work with my wordpress-mu installation on my LOCAL machine. I have been able to activate the BP plugin and even the BP theme.

I can even see the BP theme actually showing up on the browser but none of the links work. For e.g the menu’s “Blog”, “Members” etc do not work and give a 404 error. This is the actually the link that gets generated.

1. What locahost environment (OS and server) are you running your install on?

2. Did you install the bpmember theme folder in /wp-content/bp-themes/?

3. Did you choose the BuddyPress default member theme, bpmember, in WPMU’s backed? You do this by logging into WPMU as site admin, then going to “BuddyPress > General Settings > Select theme to use for BuddyPress generated pages”.

4. Do you have a .htaccess file in the directory in which you’ve installed WPMU?

Doas anyone know a good guide/tutorial for installing WPMU/Buddypress on OSX with XAMPP? I know i have to change localhost to localhost.localdomain. But where and how can i achieve this? And why isn’t it possible to run WPMU on localhost? No spamming, just for general interest.

This is truly beyond the scope of the BuddyPress forums. But, since I had some issues when I attemtpted to install WPMU on MAMP several months ago, I feel your pain.

I wrote an article (months ago) for installation of WPMU on MAMP (not MAMP Pro). But, I’m not yet finished with updating my new website, so it is not yet posted.

Here is the crux of the article. I’ve never tried this with XAMPP, so use at your own risk:

Make sure you have the most recent, stable version of WPMU and that it is copied into MAMP where you want it to be.

Read the readme.txt file that comes with WPMU

Do not manually edit either of these two files:

wp-config-sample.php file

htaccess.dist file

Unlike single version WordPress, the WPMU installer will take care of creating the proper files using these two as templates. If you need to make changes to either of these files, do so after the installation has succeeded.

WPMU wants to run on Apache port 80. Since OS X comes with a copy of Apache set to run on port 80, you will have issues if OS X is automatically configured to start its own copy of Apache on boot. If so, you’ll have to change that. Check to make sure that the Web Sharing checkbox is unchecked in System Preferences > Sharing

Now fire up your browser and go to localhost:80/index.php and follow the prompts. The path will be different if you’ve installed WPMU in a subdirectory. If so, just add the subdirectory to the url.

In the field for Server Address, you will see the recommendation to use localhost.localdomain instead of localhost. That did not work for me. Instead, I found that I had to use the internal IP address of my computer (a.k.a the local IP address which is always 127.0.0.1 ). I tried the localhost.localdomain address several different times with no success. If you have already tried this, make sure that you delete the wp-config.php file and start all over.

If you’ve done this properly, you should now be seeing a friendly “Installation Finished!” screen. Follow the instructions. Write down your password.

Now, manually enter the address for the admin login screen into your browser’s address bar. If you just hit log in, you may have issues. So, if you are using 127.0.0.1 as the Server Address, you would enter in the browser 127.0.0.1/wp-login.php. The path will be different if you’ve installed WPMU in a subdirectory.

i set up everything again (deleted complete wpmu and database). I changed host from localhost to 127.0.0.1 as u described above, even if wpmu claims to not use localhost or 127.0.0.1 as host. Now everything ist working without a problem!

Haha! Good question. I have not installed a brand new instance of WPMU for awhile so I cannot remember exactly what the installer indicates. But, I don’t think it says don’t use 127.0.0.1. Does it?

I believe it says use localhost.localdomain which if you do, the installer comes back and says, “WPMU only works without the port number in the URL.” So, when installing on a localhost environment–at least on a Mac–you’re stuck wondering what is going on.

But, this is why using the local IP address worked. It is the actual address of the local machine mapped to the alias called localhost. So, by using this, you don’t need to include the port number.